Altman: OpenAI Could Hit Its Version of AGI by Late 2026
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes the company will reach an internal system he would call artificial general intelligence by the end of the year, according to an extensive TIME report by Alex Heath based on interviews with more than 20 OpenAI executives, employees, investors and rivals, as covered by the-decoder.com. Chief Research Officer Mark Chen estimated OpenAI is “80% of the way” to AGI, while co-founder Greg Brockman said this period will be remembered as when AGI emerged.
Central to that confidence is Astra, OpenAI’s upcoming model family previously described as an automated AI research intern. Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki told TIME that Astra can already take an experimental idea, write code in OpenAI’s codebase, run the experiment and report results, handling work that would take a human researcher about a week. Altman said he expects it to be the first model that can “invent new things in a way that matters.”
The underlying bet, per the-decoder.com’s summary of the TIME report, is that such a system could trigger recursive self-improvement, though researchers remain divided on whether that capability exists yet. Debate also continues over whether language model based systems can generalize and make genuine discoveries, a basic requirement many argue AGI must meet. OpenAI defines AGI in economic terms, as autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work, a definition critics say is too narrow.
TIME also reported that OpenAI is developing hardware, including a pocket device, a wearable and a table-top device shaped like a puck expected early next year, plus future humanoid robots. On the business side, OpenAI is merging its Codex coding agent with ChatGPT in an internal project called “The Merge,” producing ChatGPT Work, and is expanding in-app advertising and testing “Sponsored Agents” to help cover costs, since 92 percent of consumer users do not pay for a subscription, CFO Sarah Friar told TIME.
Based on reporting by the-decoder.com.
